Woman in prison sex lawsuit sentenced in DUI

WEST CHESTER – The Montgomery County woman at the center of a prison sexual assault case and subsequent federal lawsuit told a Common Pleas Court judge Wednesday that she is not a criminal, even though she has four drunk driving arrests in her background.

“I am not a bad person,” said the 37-year-old woman before she was sentenced by Judge David Bortner on a probation violation stemming from a 2012 DUI arrest in Skippack, Montgomery County. “I don’t feel like a criminal, even though I’m in jail with people who steal and do all sorts of bad things.

“The whole situation stinks,” said the woman, whose name is being withheld by the Daily Local News because of the nature of the charges filed against a correctional officer at Chester County Prison who had sex with her on two occasions at the Pocopson facility.

Bortner, although crediting the woman for having voluntarily entered into two alcohol rehabilitation facilities following her arrest in September, nevertheless sentenced her to 11˝ to 23 months in county prison for the probation violation.

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He also placed her on two more years of county-supervised probation. The woman still faces sentencing for the DUI arrest in Montgomery County.

“This is not a simple case,” Bortner said. He said he agreed with the recommendation from the adult probation officer overseeing her case and the prosecution that she deserved additional prison time, but not the state sentence of one to two years suggested by probation officer Wendy Baigis.

Assistant District Attorney Max O’Keefe, who handled the violation hearing, said that the woman deserved a stiff sentence because of the nature of her most recent DUI. O’Keefe, coincidentally, was the prosecutor who was assigned to the case of the corrections officer charged with having sex with the woman while she was at the prison in 2011.

“She went on to commit a crime that is far more egregious” than her 2010 DUI, driving with her 8-year-old son in the car, O’Keefe argued. “She got a break (in 2010), the benefit of the doubt. But no longer does (she) deserve the benefit of the doubt.”

She was charged with DUI in New Mexico in 2002 and 2003, and then arrested in November 2009 for DUI by Westtown-East Goshen police.

Although Bortner said he was not taking into account the facts of the case involving the prison sexual assault in his sentence, the woman’s attorney laid the blame for her recent DUI charge on that incident.

“She was actually raped by a guard at the prison,” said defense attorney Martin P. Mullaney. “She basically never recovered from that trauma.” She stopped taking medication for a bi-polar disorder and instead “self-medicated” with alcohol. Although she knew she had problems with drinking, she nevertheless took a full time job at a Montgomery County bar, he said.

Following her arrest in September, she wet through a 14-day detox program and that stayed at an alcohol rehabilitation facility for two more months.

“She is better today than I have ever seen her,” Mullaney told Bortner. “But she did suffer a real trauma, and we are not going to do her any good by shipping her off to Muncie,” one of the state’s two prisons for female inmates.

The woman, wearing a brown sweater and jeans, told Bortner that she had suffered from alcohol dependency for years, and that the disease ran in her family. “This has been an ongoing struggle for me. Alcohol is like a pillow for me. It makes me feel good.”

Mullaney’s contention that the woman was forced to have sex while in prison is at odds with a police description of the events that took place, and by the county in its response to the civil rights lawsuit the woman filed against the prison, Warden Edward McFadden, and the man who admitted having sex with her, Dale Guyer.

In her suit, filed in October in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, the Graterford resident claims that she was forced into having “unwanted sex” with Guyer on two occasions while she was in the prison in 2010, and that as a result she suffered emotional and psychological trauma, and related physical injuries.

She is seeking more than $150,000 in damages for alleged violations of her civil rights.

In the criminal complaint charging Guyer, who was sentenced to probation last year, Chester County Detective Robert Dougherty, said the woman told him the two encounters she had with Guyer were consensual and not forced. The two lived together after her release in December 2010.

In a response to her lawsuit, West Chester attorney Guy Donatelli of the firm of Lamb McErlane, representing the county and McFadden, said the woman was a “willing participant” in the contact with Guyer, and that she had actually engaged in efforts to conceal having sex with him from prison officials and police investigators. He also referenced a letter the woman sent to a fellow inmate after her release in which she bragged about having sex with the guard.

The woman was given credit for the six months she spent in prison in 2010 and the two months in prison since her incarceration in November on the violation. She will be eligible for release in three months.